Of course we all as teachers have high expectations for our students. The tricky part I have found is making sure that I am very clear to the students on those high expectations. I have found that I am disappointed in their work and they don't meet my high expectations unless I am VERY SPECIFIC and CLEAR on the directions and expectations. The students often meet and sometimes even exceed my high expectations when they specific and clear directions. This includes reminding them of things that I used to think were obvious. For example, I frequently remind students to use best handwriting, use capital letters and punctuation, check for complete sentences, spelling, etc.

High Expectations

High Expectations: High Expectations

Biographies: Final Draft of Autobiographies

Biographies: Final Draft of Autobiographies

Unit 13: The Story of My Life - Biographies
Lesson 15 of 17

Objective: SWBAT create their final drafts of their autobiographies which include text features.

We are working on autobiographies as part of our biography unit. We will be publishing these autobiographies and giving them to family members as gifts for the holidays.

To start our lesson out today, I remind the students that even though our autobiographies have gone through a peer edit, there still could be revisions that need to be done. As they transfer their rough draft copies to the final draft pages for their autobiographies, I want them to remember that every sentence should start with a capital letter. Every name of a person, name of a place, or name of a month should start with a capital letter. Every sentence should end with the proper punctuation. If they are unsure of spelling, they can always raise their hand and ask me. I will also remind the students that their autobiography should include 3 or more text features. They need to make sure those features are present in the final copy of their autobiographies.

I will remind them that these are gifts and that they should try to do their very best which also means very best handwriting.

Resources

After I have reminded the students to look for more corrections while transferring their work from the rough draft version to the final version, I will give the students the remainder of the time today to work on the final copy of their autobiographies. I have included in the resources the page template we used for our final version which has a place for illustrations.